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During the past several weeks, I have been making the argument that progressive movements in America need to strengthen their connection to communities of faith and center their work in the church, as earlier progressive movements have done. In the past decade, millions of Americans have taken to the streets on behalf of social justice, but this has not led to much in the way of real change. The accomplishments of the civil-rights movement in the nineteen-fifties and sixties and of the Sanctuary Movement in the eighties depended, in part, on the infrastructure, moral clarity, and greater purpose of the church.

But this argument raises a question that I haven’t addressed. If it’s true that those earlier movements drew inspiration and leadership from the church, and if it’s also true that young liberals are increasingly secular, then where does that progressive energy come from? Why do young people participate in politics today, either through voting or through protest, in high numbers? What institution taught them a sense of morality, gave them words to express their outrage, and offered them the space and infrastructure to imagine a different world?

The answer is obvious: the university. In the past thirty or so years, the academy has replaced the church as the center of the liberal moral imagination, providing the sense of a community bound by ethics, a firmament of texts and knowledge that should inform action, and a meeting space for like-minded people. This isn’t an entirely new development, of course—American history is full of student-protest movements—but, rather, a consolidation of the university’s influence. Young people not only stopped going to church in large numbers, they also got fewer and fewer union jobs—and unions were the other institution in America that has historically produced a great deal of progressive change. College, particularly for middle-class and upper-middle-class kids, is now often the first and perhaps only place where young people are told that they are part of a community of their choosing, one that will prepare them to be “leaders of tomorrow” and instill in them a moral and ethical code of conduct.

So, if we accept that the university has become the incubator for social-justice movements in America, is it actually good at this job?

I began thinking about this question while reading about the effects of education on political polarization. It’s a familiar story by now: the more years of education you’ve received, the more likely you are to be a Democrat. In the past few election cycles, this correlation has become more robust. A number of conservative commentators, including Roger Kimball, Peter Wood, and Chris Rufo, maintain that political conformity overtook élite institutions of higher learning and turned every seminar room into some radical struggle session where students dutifully read Karl Marx and bell hooks. Even if you disagree, as I do, with their prescriptions to root out so-called radicalism wherever they find it, you can recognize that what they’re describing is not imaginary. In 1969, around the height of anti-Vietnam War protests and the Third World Liberation Front movement on campuses, the faculty at American universities were closer in political alignment to the general public. This held true until the end of the century, when a combination of factors—including the expansion of the social sciences, which tend to attract more liberals—led to the left-leaning academy that you see today. The extreme effects of this shift have been especially visible at élite universities; according to one conservative group’s report, seventy-seven per cent of faculty at Yale, for example, are or have largely supported Democrats, compared with just three per cent who are Republicans. But most forms of higher education have seen at least a doubling of its liberal-to-conservative gap since the nineties.

Wood argues that colleges are not only staffed with a disproportionate number of radicals who indoctrinate the students but also have turned everything from dormitory management to the dining halls over to the left. In this view, even students who might disagree with their radical professors will eventually succumb to progressive politics because it is embedded in every part of campus life. Wood and others—such as John McWhorter, who, in his book “Woke Racism,” contends that “wokeness” has become a religion on college campuses—understand that the contemporary university functions in some respects as a church, and they believe that it has taken up a dangerous and wrongheaded set of doctrines. (Wood co-authored a three-hundred-and-seventy-page study on my alma mater, Bowdoin College, because he believed that the school had become hostile to the teachings of Western civilization.) These critics do not want to change the basically religious function of the university so much as they want to swap out the sermons.

I would argue something more fundamental. Rather than fighting about so-called viewpoint diversity in higher education, and swapping different ideologies back and forth to match our political beliefs, we need to ask whether the university should have this role at all. To answer the question posed at the start of this column: the university is not good at incubating social-justice movements, or acting as a moral and ethical center of our culture. This is not only because its priests are mostly cloistered faculty but because not everyone goes to college, and many of those who do attend community colleges and commuter schools that do not play this role. The élite public and private universities are intentionally exclusionary, which is why seemingly every one of their commencement speakers talks about the assembled, in their caps and gowns, as the future leaders of America and the best of the best. The institutions that are fostering supposedly egalitarian politics limit upward mobility as much as they facilitate it. This has encouraged a type of blinkered and oftentimes unambitious style of activism among young people, which asks for many changes but does not challenge the system that provides them with their own lofty status.

This underlying contradiction doesn’t mean that students don’t care about all the suffering in the world, nor does it disqualify their dissent. But it does sometimes limit their moral scope. While studying campus movements such as the Third World Liberation Front of the late sixties and early seventies, I was struck by how many of their demands were about college life. This was, on one level, pragmatic—college students at San Francisco State and Berkeley might not be able to stop American imperialism, but they could at least force their universities to create ethnic-studies departments and change some of their admissions practices, at least at the margins. The anti-apartheid movements of the eighties decried the racism of the South African system, but mainly demanded changes in how specific universities managed their investments.

From one perspective, these localized approaches are laudable: young people have concentrated on what they can actually change while remaining committed to larger, worthy political causes. But what we end up seeing, often, is a version of what the writer Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò calls “elite capture,” in which a well-intentioned, liberatory idea gets rerouted into litigating disputes among the culturally and economically wealthy. This capture doesn’t necessarily take place at the site of protest, when angry people gather in a public square, but in the processing of the event through the media, the academy, and the political system—institutions that are overwhelmingly made up of élite college graduates. Five and a half years ago, millions of people flooded the streets of American cities. But, once everyone went home, the abiding changes took place mostly in corporate H.R. departments and in the academy. Those who left their homes to protest the murder of George Floyd weren’t secretly focussed on the diversity statistics at Bank of America or on the faculty lounge at Wesleyan University, but that moment of mass dissent got processed through the media, the government, and corporate America. If so many modern protest movements produce such results, is it because the church of the university teaches you to resolve disputes internally without truly disrupting its hierarchy?

I won’t pretend to know the answer, but I am convinced that we should deëmphasize the university’s role in our moral life. This doesn’t mean that professors need to become bots who hand out information stripped clean of any political valence, nor does it mean that colleges must hire more faculty who will tout the virtues of Western civilization. Rather, we must unlearn the idea that the moral fate of the country depends on what a handful of kids at élite colleges learn in their classrooms. As long as the university is mostly a vehicle for class reproduction, the morality that it produces will be tailored for an audience of fellow college graduates. Is it any wonder that years of liberal theorizing on how to reach non-college-educated voters have failed? Education polarization can be best understood as a quasi-religious conflict: people on both sides of the divide do not really believe that they share the same values, morals, or sense of community. And why would they? When “church” costs upward of a hundred thousand dollars a year to attend, how do you sell its sermon to the masses? ♦

Is this Waymo a better person than you? You don’t want to make assumptions, but it did come to a complete stop at the stop sign. Not a California stop—a stop during which time actually passes. You feel this, and experience a slight internal recalibration, like when someone else puts their shopping cart back and you realize you’d been hoping that no one would notice that you hadn’t.

This Waymo seems comfortable with ambiguity. You are not. When a pedestrian approaches the crosswalk, the Waymo slows—even though the pedestrian hasn’t fully committed. They’re sort of hovering, looking at their phone. They might cross. They might continue scrolling. If you were driving, you’d have spent the rest of the afternoon experiencing low-grade irritation at the pedestrian.

And when the light turns yellow, this Waymo does not speed up. It does not calculate whether it could make it. It does not believe in “probably.” It waits. Behind you, a human driver honks. The Waymo absorbs this without flinching. You feel the honk deep in your shoulder muscles.

Another car cuts in front of you. The Waymo brakes. It does not then surge forward to assert dominance. It does not briefly consider engaging in Reddit-sourced novice witchcraft to place a curse on the person who has wronged you. You imagine honking in a way that would feel educational but is actually just rage with a thesis statement.

You frequently tell yourself that you don’t text and drive. This Waymo requires no such reassurance. What you mean is that you text at red lights because it “doesn’t count,” and also once while moving because there was an extenuating circumstance—you had to fire off a killer joke in the group chat before the conversation moved on. Timing is everything. Safety, you reason, is more flexible.

And what about the time it parked perfectly between two lines on the first try, despite you having spent your entire life contorting to fit in—socially, emotionally, and physically? You resent the Waymo for being able to execute maneuvers with a grace that you do not possess. This Waymo is not programmed to spiral into an existential crisis. It does not replay its performance in slow motion while imagining all the ways in which it could have done better. You, meanwhile, have already composed a running commentary on today’s failures, and it’s only 2:47 P.M.

This Waymo has never hit the road, having forgotten that it took an edible an hour ago. It signals before turning, even when no one is around to notice. It merges seamlessly into traffic, adjusting its speed with gentle confidence. You once apologized to a squirrel you didn’t even hit.

When you arrive at your destination, the Waymo pulls up with the effortless dignity of an elegant woman whose taste has been honed over decades, who swirls a giant glass of Bordeaux in bed while scrolling on her iPad, and doesn’t spill a drop. You step out, grateful, but vaguely ashamed. The Waymo remains where it is, having completed its task correctly and without ego.

Still, it’s worth noting that, when the power goes out, the Waymo stalls where it is, while you, somehow, keep going. ♦

One morning last month, a Minneapolis resident, whom I’ll call Anna, was pulling into the parking lot at work when she noticed a fleet of dark, unmarked S.U.V.s idling nearby. A group of immigration agents dressed in street clothes emerged from the vehicles before she could get out of her car. One of them called her by her name. “I know who you are,” he said. “I know you’re a refugee.”

Anna’s first thought was to explain that there was some mistake. “I wasn’t afraid,” she later told me. At the end of 2024, she and her family, including her four children, who are from a country in Central Africa, were granted refugee status in the U.S. The federal government had resettled them in Minnesota, a state which they found cold and strange but mercifully quiet. Her immigration papers, which she always carried with her, were in order. “I thought I was going to talk to the man and show him my documents,” Anna said. Instead, as soon as she opened her car door, he put her in handcuffs.

For the next several hours, Anna sat in a room at a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, forbidden from calling her family or a lawyer. No one told her what was happening. At around eleven that night, wearing shackles around her wrists and ankles, she was put on a plane and flown to an immigration jail in Texas. Outside the cell where she would spend the next five days was a makeshift sign that read “USCIS Cases.”

Anna knew the abbreviation: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was the government agency to which she’d been submitting her legal documents. Since its creation, in 2002, U.S.C.I.S. has been the lone immigration agency at the Department of Homeland Security that doesn’t make arrests or participate in enforcement sweeps. Unlike the armed agents of ICE and Border Patrol, the roughly twenty thousand officials at U.S.C.I.S., none of whom have traditionally carried weapons, primarily act as administrators of the legal-immigration system. Almost all of the agency’s budget is funded by fees paid by immigrants applying for visas, residency status, and benefits. The applicants are often referred to as “customers” by agency staff. At U.S.C.I.S., one former official told me, “We were seen as the friendly, supportive side—the agency that tried to help people.”

Even as Donald Trump has turned the agencies of D.H.S. into something of a roving personal police force, his Administration has prosecuted a quieter but no less ambitious assault on legal immigration. Green cards and visas for people from dozens of countries have been frozen indefinitely, and the Administration has cancelled naturalization ceremonies. Immigrants and asylum seekers in the middle of the application process have been detained during routine interviews. Last April, Mohsen Mahdawi, a student at Columbia University who had a green card, was arrested during his citizenship interview, for which he’d waited a decade. “Is this a trap?” he recalled thinking, after U.S.C.I.S. called him in for an appointment; masked ICE agents took him away just after he’d signed the Pledge of Allegiance. The wife of a green-card applicant who was arrested in Salt Lake City said, “We’ve tried to do everything the right way. We have, and [now] he’s not here.”

In July, leadership at U.S.C.I.S. announced that the agency’s staff would soon have the power to make arrests and carry guns. New job postings no longer emphasized the provision of government services, but instead began advertising positions called Homeland Defenders, with responsibilities such as “defend your culture.” “It’s astonishing how swiftly the agency has shifted,” the former staffer told me. After Trump leaves office, another said, “there’s going to be some kind of bureaucratic husk called U.S.C.I.S., but that entity won’t have the ability to adjudicate requests for immigration benefits.”

By the start of the year, the Administration’s weaponization of U.S.C.I.S. reached new extremes. Anna was arrested as part of a new Department of Homeland Security policy in Minnesota called Operation PARRIS, a U.S.C.I.S. initiative that was created, according to a press release, because the state had become “ground zero for the war on fraud.” The targets of Operation PARRIS were some fifty-six hundred refugees who’d been vetted and admitted to the country by the Biden Administration. They had already gone through extensive interviews, background checks, and biometric scans. Yet U.S.C.I.S. officers were conducting their refugee interviews again, to look for grounds to strip them of their status retroactively. “No statute authorizes these warrantless arrests,” a group of lawyers led by the International Refugee Assistance Project wrote in a court filing challenging the policy. “ICE’s own guidance states that there is no authority to detain refugees merely because they have not yet adjusted their status.”

By law, a refugee has to wait a year before applying for a green card that confers permanent residency. The idea behind the operation was seemingly to impose a final roadblock; once someone has permanent residency it becomes much more difficult for the government to take it away. Around the time that the new operation was announced, Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, ordered U.S.C.I.S. officials to draft a rule that would allow the Administration to cancel someone’s refugee status without providing the person with advance notice or an opportunity to respond. The agency’s director, Joe Edlow, was dispatched to Minnesota along with a deputy; almost three dozen other officers were being sent to the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, according to an internal agency document, to “conduct visits on employment-based immigration benefits” and “applications submitted by foreign students.”

Three days after arriving in Texas, Anna was interviewed by someone who told her that he was “in charge of immigration” and that they could “talk like they were friends.” According to a source with knowledge of the agency, the interviewer was likely an official at U.S.C.I.S. who worked in the fraud-detection unit. “He already knew everything about my story,” Anna told me. Yet his questions were confusingly disconnected. Did she want to be brought back to her home country? Why couldn’t she go home? Had she ever committed a crime? “I didn’t understand what these questions had to do with what was happening to me,” Anna said. “I was depressed. I was crying. What did I do to be here?”

The interview lasted three hours. Two days later, having still not received an explanation for why she was being detained, Anna was taken to the gate outside the facility and told she could go. It was up to her to figure out how to make it home to Minnesota. When we spoke, nearly two weeks later, she still didn’t have her immigration papers. The government had confiscated them.

Last year, approximately three hundred and fifty-two thousand civil servants left their jobs, fulfilling one of the Administration’s stated goals of dismantling the government bureaucracy and demoralizing the federal workforce. Roughly eighteen hundred of those employees were at U.S.C.I.S. “Re-engineering” the staff at the agency, five former officials recently wrote in a recent Newsweek op-ed, served “both as a goal in itself and as a means of reshaping the legal immigration system.”

It began, last February, with a seemingly mundane change. Since the pandemic, a large share of U.S.C.I.S. officials had been performing some configuration of hybrid or remote work. Within days of the President’s Inauguration, the agency’s staffers received the first of a series of directives instructing them to return to the office. But there was no accompanying plan to insure that everyone would have a place to work. “The agency had grown through telework that outpaced the agency’s footprint,” Kate Angustia, who worked in the chief counsel’s office, in Washington, told me. “There were lawyers with computers sitting on radiators and the floor, working in hallways and storage closets.” At an agency office in Chicago, the city fire marshal was called because of overcrowding. On February 13th, the agency’s networks crashed from overuse.

Edlow, the President’s pick to head the agency, was said to be skeptical of the back-to-office policy, but, because of the slow nomination process, it would be seven months before he officially took over. In the meantime, a group of ideologues inside the agency were elevated to the role of senior advisers in its top office. “Most of the people who were picked came from the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate,” Sarah Pierce, who worked in the agency’s Office of Policy and Strategy at the time, told me. Fraud Detection and National Security was one of U.S.C.I.S.’s seven internal divisions. During Trump’s first term, its budget grew substantially, doubling for fraud detection and tripling for national security. But it still had a reputation for being populated by people who, a former staffer said, “felt like they were not part of the agency and had a chip on their shoulder.”

In the past, the early months of a new Administration had been a period of transition at U.S.C.I.S. while personnel waited for a new director to be sworn in. This time, a rash of policies began immediately. Some of the activity was a consequence of the President signing a series of executive orders on the first day of his term to halt the refugee-resettlement program and suspend asylum at the southern border. Rob Law, a senior counsellor at the department, was closely aligned with Miller, who’d openly clashed with high-ranking U.S.C.I.S. personnel during Trump’s first term. “Miller’s turning U.S.C.I.S. into an enforcement arm is making it seem like the reason we have an immigration system is to keep people out,” a former senior agency official told me.

Several policy priorities followed from Miller’s long-standing fixations, such as denying immigrants work authorization while their legal cases were pending and penalizing applicants who used public benefits. Pierce, whose portfolio included work on refugee and asylum services, was told that her office, by virtue of specializing in humanitarian relief, was undermining the President’s agenda. “I was asked to find data showing fraud in the asylum system—that most asylum cases are fraudulent or frivolous and that that’s why we shouldn’t be granting work authorization.” When her research contradicted the premise, she was chastised for failing to come up with enough evidence. “The referral and denial numbers for fraud alone were exceedingly low,” Pierce said. “This raised a significant red flag for the Office of Chief Counsel, since the entire premise of the regulatory changes was that fraud was high.” (An agency spokesperson said, “Immigration fraud represents an existential threat to our nation.”)

A group of agency insiders proved willing to carry out the Administration’s orders to restrict immigration through U.S.C.I.S. Michael McDermott and Nicolas Bartell, two career officials, were named senior advisers in the director’s office and for a time effectively ran the agency. McDermott, who began working at U.S.C.I.S. in 2013, had extensive experience investigating allegations of fraud in the agency’s visa programs. Near the end of Trump’s first term, he was assigned to a special detail at ICE; when he returned to U.S.C.I.S., it was to work in the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate. His view, many colleagues felt, was ideological, whereas Bartell’s seemed more opportunistic. He had led the agency’s field office in Montgomery, Alabama, before moving to the director’s office during the Biden years. Most of his colleagues left the office during the transition to Trump’s second term, but he told them he was staying, “for continuity.” In meetings, however, he would often laugh and make quips about how Biden’s policies were coming to an end. (Bartell, who did not respond to a request for comment, is currently stationed in Minnesota, running Operation PARRIS.)

“These were people seeking personal vendettas with personal pet projects,” Sarah Krieger, who worked in the Office of Policy and Strategy, told me. According to multiple sources, McDermott and Bartell attacked anyone who disagreed with them and dismissed legal analysis that didn’t immediately validate their positions. (The agency spokesperson said these claims were “baseless smear attacks against career public servants” whose “work has been exemplary.”) They also wanted to go further than the President’s Day One orders by limiting humanitarian visas and ending policies such as “deferred action,” which was supposed to protect from arrest people whose applications had passed a preliminary review but were still pending in the agency backlog.

Typically, when the agency changed a policy, staff would prepare a “decision memo,” in which different offices shared their views. Lawyers at the Office of Policy and Strategy were frequently told to remove their findings from the main text of agency documents and include them as an addendum. “A senior adviser would walk a memo over to an attorney and say, ‘You have ten minutes. Tell me if this is legally sufficient, and don’t tell anyone you looked at this,’ ” Krieger said. At one point, when she told McDermott that one of his demands contradicted an existing statute and might be at odds with the agency’s stance in pending litigation, he responded, “We don’t care what the statute says. We don’t care about court orders, and we don’t care about litigation risk.” (McDermott did not respond to a request for comment.)

Looming over the agency, meanwhile, was the threat of layoffs. Throughout the winter and early spring, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was slashing the federal workforce, in part, by offering buyouts to career officials. At the same time, the White House Office of Management and Budget was beginning to reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants to make them easier to fire. In April, Kristi Noem, the D.H.S. Secretary, sent an e-mail to department staff titled “Reshaping the DHS Workforce,” in which she gave career officials the option of offering their resignations or opting for an early retirement. Many staffers at U.S.C.I.S. were particularly nervous about getting fired, because they were generally considered to be pro-immigrant and therefore hostile to Trump. During the 2024 campaign, a right-wing organization called the American Accountability Foundation—with ties to the Conservative Partnership Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the authors of Project 2025—prepared for a second Trump Presidency by publishing the names and profiles of individual department staffers who might be disloyal; their information is accessible on a site called The D.H.S. Watchlist.

“Our bosses were pushing us to be more anti-immigrant and not to fight for small wins,” Pierce told me. “They were, like, ‘We need to keep a seat at the table.’ ” At meetings with political appointees, staffers were encouraged to describe their work as combating fraud in the immigration system. Those who disagreed with McDermott and Bartell, or who expressed anything short of unadulterated enthusiasm for the Administration’s new policies, were accused of leaking plans to the press and blocking the President’s agenda. E-mails and calls made to anyone outside the agency had to be “logged” in a spreadsheet, with a corresponding explanation of who had initiated the exchange. In one case, involving a dubious report about “special immigrant juveniles” who were suspected of being gang members, a group of agency officials weighed in using the standard protocol: they noted their reservations on the decision memo that was circulated within the agency. A few months later, they were called in to be polygraphed. This quickly became a pattern. The stories of a half-dozen staffers who’d been subjected to hours-long polygraphs spread inside the agency. Almost all of them had worked in offices that handled humanitarian benefits. Officials who refused to be polygraphed were put on administrative leave; one of them was seen being escorted out of the building by security guards. “That’s when it got really scary,” Krieger said. “We knew it could happen to anybody at any time. The choice was to get polygraphed or lose your job.”

The interviews began with the officials being Mirandized and told that their responses were under oath, which raised the possibility that they might later be charged with perjury. Yet the questions seemed inexplicably broad and subjective. One was whether the officials had ever lied, either to people close to them or to someone in a position of authority. “There wasn’t even a guise that this was about suspected leaks,” one of the former officials told me. Krieger said, “People left not because they had anything to hide but because they were afraid of how what they said could be used against them.”

Juan and his wife got married last June, in San Diego. They had met in high school, in 2021. She was a U.S. citizen; Juan, who was born in Mexico, wasn’t. He had arrived in the U.S. with his parents when he was twelve, and had never left. “A lot of ICE protests were going on in L.A. when we got married,” he told me recently. “My wife was, like, ‘I’m afraid that something might happen to you. Let’s start doing the process to get your residency. I don’t want them to take you from me.’ ”

The spouses and parents of citizens and permanent residents can apply for a green card through U.S.C.I.S., even if they have overstayed a visa or fallen out of status themselves. This has been the case for decades. But last November, about a week before Juan’s appointment, he received a call from his lawyer, who said that he’d heard the government was arresting people at the U.S.C.I.S. office in downtown San Diego. “He said he didn’t yet have a client arrested but that there was a chance,” Juan told me. “We were scared. But if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen either way.”

Juan and his wife scheduled an interview at a federal building in downtown San Diego. The session seemed completely prosaic. A female U.S.C.I.S. officer asked how they’d met and explained the paperwork that the couple would have to file in the future. “She told me, ‘You’re being approved,’ ” he said. “I felt peace. It all happened.”

Then the woman stood up from her desk as though she were stepping out to use the bathroom. “There are two other officers here who want to ask you questions,” she told him as she left the office. Two ICE officers in jeans and flannel shirts walked in. “Do you know why we’re here?” one of them asked. “No,” Juan replied. He’d assumed that they were part of U.S.C.I.S., following up to confirm basic details about his green-card application. The officer continued, “You came in with a visa that’s now expired, so you’re illegal here. We’re going to arrest you.”

At U.S.C.I.S., staff had begun to hear about such arrests as early as last June. “They were just arresting people who didn’t have arrest records,” Kate Angustia, from the chief counsel’s office, told me. “In the past, for people who were married to U.S. citizens, Congress had a statute in place: if they overstayed a visa, it was waivable. Now everyone is a lame duck.” By the fall, individual field offices, in their eagerness to fulfill the Administration’s wider mission, were beginning to arrest not just green-card applicants but asylum seekers who were showing up for administrative hearings and biometrics appointments.

A leaked field-office memo provided “instructions” for how U.S.C.I.S. officers should coördinate with ICE to entrap people. “Please provide an update approximately thirty minutes before the anticipated end of the interview,” it read. “ICE will be walked into your office, once you state that you are 5 minutes from concluding the interview.”

Juan was led to a white van in the building’s parking lot. He was handcuffed and had a chain placed around his waist, but the ICE officers, he told me, were “super chill.” One of them told him, “You’ll be O.K. This is the process now.” He waited in the van for five hours while the officers went back inside to arrest more people. Eventually Juan was joined by four or five others, and they were driven to an immigration jail along the border. “The officers who took us there were telling us that we were just numbers, that we were easy targets.” Two weeks later, after a bond hearing, he was released.

His attorney, Jan Bejar, has been practicing immigration law in the San Diego area for forty-two years. “We’re talking thousands of clients,” he told me in December. “Never in my life have I had to deal with this.” Juan and his wife had already paid U.S.C.I.S. roughly two thousand dollars to get his green card, and had to fight his detention case anyway. “They go fishing in an aquarium, and they say, ‘Look how many fish we caught,’ ” Bejar said, of the government.

Juan’s case was hardly an isolated incident. In mid-December, I spoke with Jeremy Lower, a thirty-three-year-old maintenance technician from Ohio who had gone with his wife, a Mexican national, to a U.S.C.I.S. office, in Cleveland, for a preliminary green-card interview. It was the Monday before Thanksgiving, and Lower had taken the day off from work. “We were going to celebrate,” he said. “We’d been waiting for this day for two and a half years.” The officer conducted their interviews separately, so Lower was in the waiting room when two ICE officers took his wife into custody. “She was told she was being deported,” he told me. By the end of the day, the government had flown her to a detention center in Texas, and the couple’s lawyer had to intervene to halt her removal. She spent a month in detention before being released, which was especially puzzling given the fact that Lower had checked on the status of his wife’s U.S.C.I.S. petition the day she was taken into custody. It had been approved.

In April, Sarah Krieger received an e-mail about a trafficking victim, who had recently been arrested by ICE. The woman, who’d been a witness for the prosecution in an ongoing case, had applied for a temporary benefit known as a T visa, which confers legal protection to trafficking victims who coöperate with federal law enforcement. She had waited more than six months, but hadn’t received a notice from U.S.C.I.S. acknowledging receipt of her application. “There are thousands of applications that are sitting unopened in regional offices because so many staff have left the agency,” Krieger told me. “Literally boxes in mailrooms.” Krieger managed to find the woman’s application and sent an agency receipt to ICE. She was deported anyway.

Last October, the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of at least eight immigrants who had applied for visas as victims of trafficking, criminal acts, or gender-based violence. Because of processing delays that could take years, the Biden Administration created a policy that allowed for a preliminary review of a person’s case file to determine if they were a “bona fide” applicant; if so, U.S.C.I.S. gave them a special designation for deferred action, meaning that they wouldn’t be arrested while their application was pending. “Now U.S.C.I.S. simply refuses to look at the application,” Sarah Kahn, a lawyer at the center, told me.

Even those whose applications U.S.C.I.S. had reviewed during the past Administration were being arrested—this was the specific basis for the center’s lawsuit. In late December, I spoke on the phone with one of the plaintiffs, Jackie Merlos, a forty-four-year-old Honduran mother of four U.S. citizens who’s lived in the country with her husband for the past twenty-two years. In March, 2024, the couple was sitting on their porch, in Portland, Oregon, when a burglar, who was trying to break into a truck across the street, threatened them at gunpoint. They reported him to the police and coöperated with the ensuing investigation, which qualified them for a so-called U visa. That December, the agency finally conducted a preliminary review of Merlos’s application and determined it was “bona fide.” Last June, however, she and her children were arrested and jailed in Washington State. For two weeks, her children—a seven year-old and nine-year-old triplets—were held with her, despite being U.S. citizens themselves. “You’re here because you’re a criminal,” an agent had told her in front of her kids. “He just wanted to get rid of us,” she told me. It would be four months before she was finally released on bond. By then, the construction business she ran with her husband had closed. “I barely leave the house now,” she said.

Late last year, when I started speaking to current and former agency officials, the President announced that the government was indefinitely pausing all asylum and green-card applications from Afghanistan and eighteen other countries. At the time, an Afghan national who’d worked with American forces in the country before getting asylum in the U.S. had allegedly shot two National Guard troops in D.C. The Administration immediately moved to exploit the tragedy. Individual acts of wrongdoing became the pretext for the vilification of entire nationalities. Operation PARRIS, for example, began in the wake of a scandal in Minnesota, in which some eighty Somali Americans were found to be defrauding the state’s public benefits system.

At U.S.C.I.S., the targeting of specific nationalities wasn’t a matter of mere rhetoric but actual policy. Earlier this year, the Administration announced that it was indefinitely pausing green-card applications for people from seventy-five countries. By law, there are roughly two hundred and twenty-six thousand green cards issued each year to the adult children and siblings of current citizens as well as spouses and minor children of permanent residents; if these green cards aren’t used, they are reassigned to a different branch of the system tied to employment-based benefits. “The administration has always hated family-based immigration,” the former senior U.S.C.I.S. official told me. “Most employment-based green cards go to people who are already here.” It remains to be seen whether U.S.C.I.S. will apply the unused green cards to the employment side of the system this year. If it doesn’t, the green cards will be lost permanently. Whittling away the core functions of the agency has starved U.S.C.I.S. of the bureaucratic capacity it once had. “If they want, they can just be ‘unprepared to process’ ” the leftover green cards, the official said.

Meanwhile, the White House has called on U.S.C.I.S. to initiate between a hundred and two hundred “denaturalization” cases each month, which consists of stripping naturalized citizens of their existing legal status. Miller had pushed a similar but far less ambitious agenda during Trump’s first term, but it failed to materialize, largely because of legal constraints. (The government had filed a hundred and two denaturalization cases in the entirety of the first Trump Administration, according to figures from the Justice Department.) “Once you naturalize, the file gets ‘retired’ ” and sent to the National Records Center, Krieger told me. “Files are hard to find.” The obvious question, multiple sources told me, is where U.S.C.I.S. officials would even begin the denaturalization process. “You’re going to have to pick some characteristic to be the basis for calling up these files and scrutinizing them,” one of them told me. “Probably they’ll just go down a list, and start going country by country, targeting people from each one.” ♦

Hey, team, thanks so much for joining. Given everything that’s happening in the world right now, upper management have decided that we in middle management needed to create a space of support. And so, we have gathered here today, on Zoom, to support you, our hardworking teammates, in this brand-new meeting series we are calling “Team Support Space.”

It’s a lot out there right now. So many bad things are happening every day. It can be difficult not to succumb to fear, sloth, gluttony—take your pick! And let’s not forget hate. There’s so much hate—self-hatred included, believe me.

In that global context, community is vital. During times like these, we, your colleagues, are here for you. If you come away from this meeting with only one thing, make it this: No matter where you sit on the political spectrum or what your beliefs are, this organization welcomes and supports each and every one of you. We support you so much that we are specifically allocating valuable company time to do so.

Before I open it up to you all for sharing and receiving support, I want to lay down some ground rules and guidelines. These are being set forth by both middle management and the employee-experience department, formerly known by the dehumanizing moniker “human resources.” You are so much more than resources to be mined by this organization. All of us, at all levels of management, know and respect that. And, to that end, your employee-experience team and middle management have developed three simple frameworks to make the best use of this space and time.

First, in the interest of everyone’s psychological safety, in our discussion today, let’s not get too specific about our political stances. Or even which of the many challenges facing the world you are referring to during your share. Does your anxiety or stress have to do with the climate—political or environmental? Does it have to do with a war—literal or figurative, as in, “the war on X topic” or “the war in Z location”? Who can know? No one. We won’t know unless you tell us. So, don’t tell us.

The employee-experience team has kindly offered a list of phrases they have found helpful that you can leverage. These will be pinned in the chat and also sent in a follow-up e-mail. You can say “the state of the world today,” “the way things are,” “the moment we’re living in,” or simply, “the times.” Though I might strike that last one, actually. I wouldn’t want it to seem like you were mentioning a publication that may or may not have a particular political leaning. Regardless, you get my meaning. Strategic wording is mandatory in this discussion and sharing space today. The first principle of the team support space is: Vague Is Virtuous. It’s for everyone’s protection that we advise this.

But for our time here to be well spent, you must allow your feelings to surface. That is how healing happens. Too many of our best and brightest have been overheard crying in bathroom stalls or have abruptly gone off-camera in the middle of a meeting, clearly overwhelmed. It’s not good for anyone. Not for you or for upper and middle management. Bringing your whole selves to work means bringing a truckload of emotions. We have accepted this. There are the emotions we love, like your determination and your passion. But also the pesky ones, like your terror and your existential dread. We want this space to be one where all of you can express and process your unproductive emotions. And, to be clear, we want you to do it together, in one hyperconcentrated period of time.

Yes, spaces like this can be awkward. You may be apprehensive about expressing your feelings in front of each other at a pre-scheduled bi-monthly get-together. But to help you overcome those anxieties, keep in mind Principle No. 2: Emote When Efficient. We know that you all deeply value efficiency—it being one of the founding values approved by our board of directors. So, when in doubt, close your eyes, take a deep breath, think of the board, and express yourself. This is the place to do that in the most efficient and effective way possible. The employee-experience team is here for you. Please let it all out now and not later.

Our third principle is crucial. While this organization has its flaws and has no doubt contributed to your mental decline in various ways, that is not what this space is for. I am preëmpting any potential tangent about organizational issues because they’re real. I myself have certainly felt frustrated with this place, even as recently as five minutes before I kicked off this meeting. I get it. But hear me when I say that this space does not have the capacity for repair conversations. Please see the employee-efficiency team if you would like to schedule an organizational-issue repair conversation, as those are best done in private and not in the team support space. Hence Principle No. 3: Repair Elsewhere.

Of course, this meeting is entirely optional. Or perhaps it’s not, depending on your most recent performance evaluation. Let me look into that. For now, let’s get started! Given that this session was scheduled for fifteen minutes, we now have about five minutes left for sharing. Unless you’d like me to give you some time back. Actually, scratch that. Even if no one is ready to share, we can still hold this space for each other in silent support.

Alright, team, let’s do this! Who’d like to kick us off? ♦

In the years after he was named the deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia, in 2015, Mohammed bin Salman—known informally as M.B.S.—has accumulated remarkable power in the country. (He became crown prince in 2017.) Saudi Arabia, under his de-facto leadership, embarked on a military campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, temporarily kidnapped the Prime Minister of Lebanon, and blockaded Qatar. Many of these actions were part of a campaign to isolate Iran, whose Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, M.B.S. referred to in 2017 as “the new Hitler.” While conducting his aggressive foreign policy, M.B.S. had a close ally: Mohamed bin Zayed, the President of the United Arab Emirates. “M.B.Z. saw M.B.S. as a younger version of himself: smart, energetic, and eager to confront enemies,” Dexter Filkins reported for this magazine in 2018.

In the past few months, however, things have changed. The alliance that promised to reshape the Middle East has collapsed into acrimony, with Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. on different sides of violent conflicts in Yemen and in Sudan. The two countries are increasingly competing for economic opportunities in the region, while Saudi Arabia sees the U.A.E. as too willing to ally with Israel, and the U.A.E. seems resentful of Saudi Arabia’s power.

I recently spoke by phone with Kristian Ulrichsen, the author of “The United Arab Emirates: Power, Politics and Policy-Making” and a fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what’s really behind the rift in this once strong alliance, what’s driving the U.A.E.’s catastrophic intervention in Sudan, and how the Trump Administration’s transactional approach to foreign policy may exacerbate the rivalry between the two countries.

Why has a falling out occurred over the past several months?

The trigger was in early December when the U.A.E.-backed forces in Yemen, especially the separatist Southern Transitional Council, moved into two provinces of eastern Yemen and upended the fragile balance of power in Yemen. The Saudis saw this as highly provocative, as unhelpful to the anti-Houthi coalition in Yemen, and as a threat, because of the Yemeni-Saudi border, to Saudi security. And the U.A.E.’s initial advance was also on the same day Gulf leaders were meeting in Bahrain. So, in Riyadh, it was seen as a major provocation that a close ally, such as the U.A.E., would green-light an advance that was seen as so antithetical to Saudi interests.

The U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia were initially part of the same anti-Houthi alliance, as the Houthis were seen as a proxy for Iran, a regional rival for both countries. The war itself has been disastrous for Yemenis, but the thinking was that, broadly speaking, the two countries were aligned on that front.

Well, they both went into Yemen together in March, 2015. It was M.B.S.’s first major foreign-policy move after becoming minister of defense in January of that year. Initially, there was coördination between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, especially between M.B.S. and M.B.Z., but gradually they began to diverge as Saudi forces became bogged down fighting the Houthis, while the U.A.E. was much more successful in pushing back the Houthis and reclaiming territory from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. So the U.A.E. felt like it had accomplished its mission.

Meanwhile, the U.A.E. was coming under a lot of political pressure from the United States, and other parts of the world, about its tactics in the war. So in July, 2019, the U.A.E. announced that it was redeploying its forces, and it pulled back from the anti-Houthi battle lines in central Yemen, and switched to supporting militias and other groups on the ground, especially in southern Yemen, to insure access to a network of ports and maritime access on the Red Sea, on both sides of the Yemen-Africa coastline. Then, in 2022, a truce was reached between the Houthis and the Saudi-led coalition, which has more or less held for the past four or five years. Since then, the conflict in Yemen has been almost frozen, which made the S.T.C.’s November advance so surprising. Nobody saw it coming. And the issue of why the U.A.E. or the S.T.C. would’ve wanted to reignite the advance is probably something that the Saudis are trying to get to the bottom of. There have been reports that the U.A.E. felt that, when M.B.S. was visiting the White House in mid-November, he should not have raised the issue of the Sudanese civil war with President Trump, in which the U.A.E. has been backing a non-state militia group, the Rapid Support Forces.

I want to turn to Sudan in a minute, but it does feel that, in Yemen and across the region, Saudi Arabia has acted incredibly aggressively over the past decade. Now something seems to have switched, and the U.A.E. seems more aggressive. What changed?

Between 2015 and about 2019, you had an alignment between the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia, between M.B.Z. and M.B.S. They were both much more interventionist and assertive, even aggressive, in their regional policies. This was after the Arab Spring. They felt that they had to be forceful in trying to push what they saw as countries that they saw supporting movements of change. Turkey and Qatar were examples. And the Saudis and Emiratis really wanted to limit radical change. And so they went into Yemen together in March, 2015. They intervened or they came together with the blockades of Qatar in 2017, orchestrating a blockade which lasted until January, 2021. And the Saudis intervened in Lebanon’s political affairs in November, 2017, holding the Lebanese Prime Minister hostage until he announced his resignation. So the Saudis were willing to intervene to project their interests across the region, and they were on the same page as the U.A.E. in many of these cases.

But what changed was the missile and drone attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure in September, 2019, which were assumed to be perpetrated by, but were never formally attributed to, Iran. And President Trump did nothing in response. He actually said, a couple of days after the attacks, “That was an attack on Saudi Arabia, and that wasn’t an attack on us.” And that sent shock waves through Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. The Saudis began to pull back immediately. They began to realize that they were perhaps on their own much more than they had thought. And so, in the twenty-twenties, they began to de-escalate tensions with Iran, improve ties with Turkey to reduce sources of geopolitical risk, and focus on internal issues and economic growth.

Meanwhile, the U.A.E. was still much more willing to take risks, including by identifying and backing sub-state networks in countries without functioning state institutions that could better support security and governance on the ground. That’s where that divergence really grew throughout the twenty-twenties.

And I assume you view Yemen as an example of this.

Yes. The Saudis feel that there has been a fragile but stable balance of power in Yemen since 2023, and that these moves by the U.A.E., or by the U.A.E.-backed S.T.C., are disruptive and unnecessary and threaten that balance of power.

You brought up M.B.S.’s visit to the White House in November, where he reportedly suggested sanctions against the U.A.E. Now we have a propaganda war on each side, with real anger from people in both governments, expressed on social media and elsewhere. I get that the two countries have different visions for the region, but does it seem like, given the speed with which this has spiralled out of control, there’s a deeper anger here?

I think this animosity is part of each side trying to insure their narrative is the one that wins out, especially vis-à-vis the Trump Administration. Clearly, what M.B.S. may or may not have said during his visit to the White House in November, and whether or not it was taken as an attack by the U.A.E., rather than just a call for sanctions on the R.S.F., is a matter of fierce debate on both sides. It could be that perceptions have been driving the respective responses to a large extent, as each side seems to believe what it wants to hear. And yes, the depth of feeling is indicative of much deeper issues at play. In Yemen especially, these splits have been increasing for years as the two countries approached the conflict in different ways, but both sides decided to ignore the ramifications of their different approaches, and now they’ve become too big to ignore.

In terms of economics and investments, the Saudis are having difficulties in attracting foreign investment. They’ve been forced to scale back on some projects. And they’re trying to move into some of the economic sectors, like travel, tourism, and entertainment, that the U.A.E. has had a twenty- to twenty-five-year head start in. So there’s increasing economic competition between the countries as well, which is part of the backdrop to this rivalry, even though, at this point, it’s more economic and security-focussed, and isn’t yet a political rupture like the one during the blockade of Qatar in 2017.

How do you think competing for the favor of the Trump Administration, which is uninterested in human rights and very interested in economic investments, changes the rivalry? There has been reporting about the U.A.E. buying huge stakes in a Trump family company.

I think Trump’s transactional approach to governing and policymaking has definitely created opportunities for the Gulf states, and both the Saudis and the Emiratis have made the most of those opportunities. In 2017, they felt that they had a once-in-a-generation chance to achieve their objectives vis-à-vis Qatar by enlisting Trump’s support. And after Trump was inaugurated in 2025, both countries reached out straight away with promises of investments, both in Trump-aligned companies and in bilateral investments. Both countries made separate pledges about investing in the U.S. economy. But they’ve done it separately. So they’re competing, I think, for the ear of the White House. Trump went to both Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi in May, last year. We’ve also seen the U.A.E. take the lead in A.I. over the past four or five years. In that sector, the Saudis are playing catch-up. So these things are all part of that competitive rivalry we see playing out, which now has much more of an edge to it than it did in the past.

Let’s turn to the U.A.E. specifically. We don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of people have died in Sudan, but the U.A.E.-backed R.S.F. seems to be the most brutal actor among many in this conflict. Have you been surprised by the U.A.E.’s enduring support for the R.S.F., despite the bloodshed?

I have been surprised by the fact that international criticism, even condemnation, of the R.S.F., and its pretty well-documented links to the U.A.E., including transfers of weapons under the guise of humanitarian support, hasn’t forced the U.A.E. to backtrack or to compromise its support. The U.A.E., in a way, has doubled down on the support for the R.S.F., and that, I think, has been a surprise. If you think back to Yemen in 2018, international criticism did ultimately lead to a change in approach. In Sudan, if anything has happened, it is that the atrocities committed by the R.S.F. have gotten worse. It may be that Abu Dhabi is now so entrenched and feels very defensive, even isolated in the region, that it has decided to double down on its support for the R.S.F., regardless of international criticism.

Do you view the U.A.E.’s increasingly aggressive actions in the Middle East and Africa as having some strong ideological component, or is this more about projecting regional power and securing practical ends, like port access and other business interests? Because, when we go back to the period after the Arab Spring when this approach started, there was a sense that the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia were embarking on an ideological project that was in part about opposition to Iran, but also to a certain strain of Islamist politics, as represented by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Erdoğan in Turkey, etc.

I think there’s a bit of both. For example, the U.A.E. has intervened heavily in Libya in the past decade, in part because the Qataris were supporting what the U.A.E. views as Islamist groups in western Libya. In response, the U.A.E. intervened in eastern Libya, backing an authoritarian strongman. And, starting with that decision, you now find links between Libya and Chad and Sudan that show the networks the U.A.E. has built up in the wider regional arena.

The U.A.E. is one of the heaviest international investors in Africa. A lot of it is economic. There are heavy investments in renewable energy and infrastructure, for example, across the continent. But there is also that component of trying to push back against, as they see it, Islamist influence, by backing authoritarian strongmen who try to limit the spread of Islamist movements and groups. So there is a combination of both. And of course, in the U.A.E., Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan is both the national-security adviser and the head of many of the country’s biggest investment groups. So you can very clearly see a link between security and investment in Emirati policy.

The Saudis were less rigid. They were more pragmatic in some ways. For example, in Yemen, the Saudis were willing to work with Islamists in southern Yemen, specifically, a group that is sort of the Yemeni offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, whereas the U.A.E. was adamantly opposed to working with them. Again, it goes back to risk calculations. M.B.Z. has a zero-tolerance approach to any form of political dissent. And, in that context, he believes that Islamist movements are the most likely form of political dissent. If you give them an opening, they will take more and more. And so he has a zero-tolerance approach, meant to deny them even an opening.

What do you make of the Saudis accusing the U.A.E. of becoming too close to Israel? Because, for a long time, it seemed that M.B.S. was the one hoping to get closer to Israel, and who wanted a normalization deal between the Saudis and the Israelis.

Yeah, part of the Saudi propaganda campaign has been to play up the depths of ties between the U.A.E. and Israel, and to describe the U.A.E. and Israel as being the disruptors of regional politics today. And this is even though, as you say, before October 7th, the Saudis were in dialogue with the United States over the contours of a deal with Israel. M.B.S. said it himself in a Fox News interview in late September, 2023, about three weeks before October 7th, saying that they were getting close to what would be the biggest deal since the end of the Cold War. So there was definitely a feeling that a deal was doable. Whereas now, with everything that has happened in Gaza, the price for Saudi Arabia has risen. I think they still would like to eventually normalize, but they’re going to ask for a higher price to sell it domestically.

Is Saudi Arabia more wary of domestic political pressure than the U.A.E. is?

Saudi Arabia is much larger. There are more than twenty million Saudi citizens. It’s the home of the two holiest sites in Islam. There’s a religious element to Saudi policymaking as the guarantor of Mecca and Medina. So the Saudis are always more careful about how their policies are seen, both domestically and across the Arab and Muslim worlds. So they might lack the ability of the U.A.E., which has a much smaller population, to act decisively and fast, even though M.B.S. did a lot of decisive and fast actions at the beginning of his time as crown prince. But, again, there’s more of a caution in Saudi policymaking, especially when it comes to something as sensitive as diplomatic relations with Israel, which many Saudi citizens still, in opinion polls, do not seem too enthusiastic about.

You said that M.B.S. started becoming less aggressive in 2019, after Iran’s attack on Saudi oil fields. Do you think that the worldwide condemnation of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, in 2018, had anything to do with it, too?

It did. It certainly brought initial plans for his so-called Vision 2030 to a halt. If you remember, M.B.S. spent several weeks in the United States in 2018, meeting former Presidents, being celebrated in Silicon Valley, and meeting all the tech titans. That all came to a shuddering halt after Khashoggi’s death. M.B.S. really became persona non grata in Western circles, up until, ironically, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Vladimir Putin’s isolation in 2022 led to the rehabilitation of M.B.S., as Western leaders realized that they had to deal with him whether they liked it or not.

Because of oil prices, you mean?

Yes, because at the time, oil prices were rising, and the West wanted Saudi support in managing oil prices and output levels. Biden, of course, went to Saudi Arabia after this and fist-bumped M.B.S., after previously having said he had to be held accountable.

A lot of the early articles about M.B.S. and M.B.Z. focussed on a kind of mentorship that M.B.Z. supposedly provided. I’m curious if you think that kind of narrative was oversimplified, and if you think their falling out has anything to do with their personal dynamic.

I’m not sure if there was ever a mentor-mentee relationship, but M.B.Z. is twenty-four years older than M.B.S., and I think M.B.Z. certainly saw in M.B.S. a version of himself, somebody who was willing to take risks (even if he’s less willing now), somebody who was willing to break eggs to make an omelette, and somebody who could see the bigger picture of economic reform. The U.A.E., like most of the other Gulf states, was concerned that with the advanced age of leadership in Saudi Arabia, and with multiple economic and social challenges building up, the Saudis needed a decisive transformation. They needed someone to really grasp the policymaking process. And in M.B.S. they found that person. Initially, M.B.Z. spent a lot of time in Western capitals talking him up. People in the West didn’t know who he was, and they weren’t sure whether to take him seriously. And M.B.Z. played a reassuring role in saying, “He’s the real deal.” So, at the beginning, he was important in establishing M.B.S.’s credibility.

I think the challenge was always that these are two headstrong characters. M.B.Z. is older, but M.B.S. is now the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, the regional leader in many ways. So I think there was always going to be a clash of character over who had the upper hand in the relationship. And we’re seeing that play out now, where neither one wants to be the one that backs down. ♦

There is much to be said for temptation in two dimensions. A menu, stuck against the window of a restaurant or framed on the wall outside, calls out to our salivary glands and draws us over the threshold. The same goes for posters at a cinema: their primary purpose, no doubt, is to lure us into the dark. But there’s a difference. Seldom is a menu an object of beauty, whereas the history of movie posters is strewn with images so luscious, or so startling, that they stand proud in their own right and even risk eclipsing the product that they are meant to hawk. The promise of the apple, dangled before us, can be juicier than the flesh.

Getting hold of that history, these days, can be a costly business. In November, at Heritage Auctions, in Dallas, a poster for the 1938 rerelease of “King Kong” went for $68,750. Some brave bidder spent more than a hundred grand on a “Dracula” from 1947. Talk about blood money. Every art form has its grails, and it seems that the holiest of relics, in this field, would be an original poster for “Metropolis” (1927). At auction, in 2005, one sold for six hundred and ninety thousand dollars. Just to be greedy, MOMA has two of the damn things. Neither is currently on show.

New Yorkers with lighter wallets need not despair. There are a number of troves for the treasure seeker, none more enticing than Posteritati, a store on Centre Street, which has been in operation as a business since 1995. A browse through its recent acquisitions, online, led me swiftly to a bunch of Antonionis from the early nineteen-sixties—“L’Avventura,” “L’Eclisse,” and a sumptuous “La Notte,” with the face of Jeanne Moreau drawn in black-and-white save for her candy-pink kisser. Or how about a 1973 Japanese poster of “Charade,” featuring a head-scarfed Audrey Hepburn against a backdrop of blazing blue, for four hundred and fifty bucks? A steal. It would be like having a patch of sky on your bedroom wall.

Whether you are buying, researching, or resigned to simply dreaming, the plethora of choice in the poster market is enough to turn the mildest fan into a drunken Aladdin, stumbling helplessly around the cave. One tip: pick an actor, a director, a period, or a country of origin, tie them together, and follow the thread of your taste. Anyone in need of extra Hepburn, for example (and who isn’t?), is advised to scout beyond the obvious borders. I am lucky enough to possess an American poster for “Funny Face,” from 1957, with not one but two Audreys—her head and shoulders in scarlet, plus her full-length figure, black-clad, and blissfully lost in a dance. If I had the means, however, I would supplement that with a 1964 poster for “Roman Holiday” from what was then Czechoslovakia, with “Audrey Hepburnová,” as she is listed, superimposed on an overhead shot of Rome in a merry modernist patchwork; or else a Polish invitation to the same film, from 1959, which transforms her into a red-skirted sprite from a children’s picture book.

Here’s a joke: for the freest and the most fantastical posters of all, you can’t beat an oppressed state. In postwar Communist Poland, under the auspices of the Ministry of Art and Culture, designers were pretty much let off the leash. Many artistic enterprises, including theatre, opera, and the circus were promoted by their imaginings, but, for sheer nerve, cinema took the crown. Why so? Perhaps because of the culture clash involved. The pure products of America and its capitalist corporations, such as Warner Bros. and Twentieth Century Fox, banged against the lyrical (and notably anti-prudish) wit that was permitted to flourish, somehow, in the Soviet bloc. Official Hollywood posters, especially in the Reagan years, were spurned in favor of surreal homegrown imagery, most of it only obliquely connected to the movies in question.

A case in point would be “Working Girl,” Mike Nichols’s 1988 comedy of office politics. Some American viewers were pulled into it by a boring—and slightly embarrassing—poster of Harrison Ford, smirking in a suit, while a loyal Melanie Griffith clings to his shoulder and Sigourney Weaver, as befits her role of nemesis, gives a wicked smile. No such prosaic and plot-heavy come-ons for the Polish release; instead, an inky image of a man’s head cut diagonally in half, with a serrated edge. Up the resulting staircase walks a tiny female figure in black tights. As a rule, examining Polish posters of this ilk, and trying to guess which films are being publicized, is a deliciously difficult sport. A man trapped in the beak of a giant crow? Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours.” A blindfolded head, with a flickering green tongue? “Broadcast News.” A pair of telephone handsets, poking out of robes and exchanging toothy grins? Why, “Terms of Endearment,” of course.

What links the above is that all were begotten by one man—Andrzej Pągowski, born in 1953. (In 1992, he became an art director at Polish Playboy. His first cover showed a paint-splattered bunny silhouette.) For the heartfelt poster nerd, this is where collecting grows most focussed, in the pursuit of works by an individual artist. Swooping away from Eastern and Central Europe, and back to the free world, you could opt for Saul Bass, whose crookedly angled posters for “Vertigo” and “The Man with the Golden Arm” have been widely reproduced—although, be warned, an original will not come cheap. Then, there is Alberto Vargas, who, before he, too, migrated to Playboy, created posters for pre-Code melodramas that enshrine the audacity of the age. How his poster for “The Sin of Nora Moran,” with its uncluttered, near-naked depiction of the heroine, ever appeared on a public wall, in 1933, without getting torn down, I have no idea.

Some deserving names, though, are still obscure, and that is why an exhibition at Poster House, on West Twenty-third Street, running until April 12th, is to be welcomed with gusto. Here, in the first American museum that is dedicated solely to the art of the poster, is your chance to inspect the output of a master. The show bears the title, “Art for Art House: The Posters of Peter Strausfeld,” to which most people will respond, “Peter who?”

Strausfeld was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1910. Nourished on a love of Expressionist art, and having designed work that was critical of Nazism, he left his native land in 1938. Safe in the haven of Britain, he found himself interned, in the early nineteen-forties, as an “enemy alien”—a term applied to almost anyone, including Jewish refugees, who had fled from countries with which Britain was then at war. Strausfeld, like many internees, was taken to the Isle of Man, off the northwest coast of England. The communities that arose there became, to a near-comical degree, temporary cultural strongholds, crammed with artists, musicians, medics, and academics. Among them was Kurt Schwitters, one of the great collagists of the century.

It was on the Isle of Man that Strausfeld met an Austrian film producer and director named George Hoellering—a fruitful encounter, by any standard. Once released, the two men made animated films for the British war effort (so much for being enemies, or aliens), and then, in 1944, Hoellering took charge of the Academy, a cinema on London’s Oxford Street. A movie theatre—or, at any rate, an arena for the viewing of projected images—had existed on the site since 1906, under a variety of names, with an increasing emphasis on European fare throughout the nineteen-thirties. That reputation was fortified during Hoellering’s reign, which lasted until his death, in 1980, and crystallized by an unforgettable series of posters. They were displayed not just outside the cinema but around London, not least in Underground stations, and they confirmed the Academy’s status as a mecca for the adventurous moviegoer. The posters were the work of Strausfeld.

The Poster House show is founded on the private collection of Michael Lellouche, who, in his introduction to the accompanying book, points out an extraordinary symbiosis. “Hoellering never produced a poster without Strausfeld,” Lellouche writes, “and Strausfeld never designed a poster for anyone but Hoellering.” No Renaissance Pope could command such exclusive loyalty. Strausfeld did teach at Brighton College of Art (later part of Brighton Polytechnic), on the south coast of England, for many years, but the fruits of his labors for the Academy are the cause of his meticulous appeal.

Photographic imagery forms no part of a typical Strausfeld poster, even though he often based his designs on production stills. His medium was the linocut print—clean, strong, and scornful of embellishment. Every edge is hard, every shadow is hatched; colors are kept to a minimum, but those which are deployed make a formidable impact. There is none of the delicate feathering of a drypoint etching, and, because linoleum is bereft of knots and rings, there is no grain, such as you might expect in a woodcut. Information is delivered with a shock. Consider the 1973 poster for Claude Chabrol’s “Red Wedding,” which consists of two staring figures and three hues: black, white, and blood. Above the title are the words “Academy Cinema Two, Oxford Street - 437 5129.” Offhand, how many works of art do you know that give a phone number? Imagine Edward Hopper adding a Zip Code to “Nighthawks,” for anyone who couldn’t sleep, wanted a cup of coffee, and didn’t know where to go.

If poster art is a mass medium, here is the punchy exception: images made by one person, for one movie, at one cinema. That’s not unique—starting in 1918, Josef Fenneker designed posters for the Marmorhaus, in Berlin, some of them frighteningly stark—but it’s uncommon, and it means that most people who visit the show at the Poster House will be heading into unknown territory. Print lovers, I suspect, will be more at home than movie buffs; the graphic confidence of Strausfeld, at once forthright and haunting, suggests nothing so much as “Intimacies,” the wonderful sequence of ten woodcuts that was produced by Félix Vallotton in 1897-98. Each of those has a title (“The Lie,” “Five O’Clock,” “Money,” and so forth), and together they fuse into an early graphic novel, taut with frustration and desire. From there to the Strausfeld poster for Chabrol’s “The Butcher,” in which an exhausted couple lean on each other with closed eyes, or for Luis Buñuel’s “Tristana,” which sets the profile of Catherine Deneuve sharply against a flat plane of grass green, is really not much of a leap.

The Academy, in its prime, expanded to three screens, and the programming both mirrored and fostered an impassioned new interest in foreign films. In order to summon up the eagerness of that vanished era, you need only cast your eyes over the names that are writ large on Strausfeld’s posters. Buñuel, Bergman, Éric Rohmer, Satyajit Ray, Miloš Forman, and plenty of Andrzej Wajda and Miklós Jancsó—the Hungarian doyen of the long take. To the seasoned poster-gatherer, what’s remarkable about this list is the fact that it consists of directors. For any publicity department in Hollywood’s heyday, that would have been unthinkable; it was stars, and stars alone, who were guaranteed to inveigle the masses.

Take a representative poster from 1938. The space is filled by the face of Bette Davis, then by her name, and only then by the title, “Jezebel.” Way below, in much smaller type, comes the name of the director, William Wyler, who to worshippers of Davis was no more important than her chauffeur. The same is true today, more than critics care to admit. If you’d accosted fans of Tom Cruise as they came out of “Top Gun: Maverick” and asked them who had directed it, how many would have given the correct answer, “Joseph Kosinski”? Eight per cent? Ten?

Now and then, at the Academy, the rule was broken, and the star came first. Hence the Strausfeld poster for “The Lacemaker,” in 1977, which was topped not by the name of the director, Claude Goretta, but by that of Isabelle Huppert. The image is stuck fast in my memory. In England, at that time, I rarely ventured up to London—a city that, then as now, I dreaded and disliked. I had no friends there, and no money to spend; the only things that attracted me were the National Gallery (which was, and remains, free to visit) and movie theatres, the Academy above all. Purely on the strength of Strausfeld’s poster, I made a pilgrimage to see “The Lacemaker.” It was rated AA, which meant that you had to be fourteen or over to watch it. Oh, the thrill!

Still out of bounds to me, alas, were X movies. In Britain, the rating did not automatically give off the same perspiring whiff of seediness that it did in the United States. Many fine films were deemed too extreme for anyone under eighteen, including several that earned a linocut from Strausfeld. Among them were Forman’s “A Blonde in Love,” Marco Bellocchio’s “Fists in the Pocket,” and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Vivre Sa Vie”—or, to use its clumsy British rendering, “It’s My Life.” The poster for Godard’s film is a masterpiece, rivalling the clarity of the movie. Anna Karina, the star, gazes off to the left. (A reversal of her actual pose, in the scene from which Strausfeld is working.) Her sleeves, her bob, and her lashes are conveyed in crisp black. Her hairband and her eyeshadow are of baby blue. And her lips, like the wooden partition on which she leans, are as red as Beaujolais.

Yet that is not the end of the affair. The poster is honored with a coda. It shows up on a wall, unremarked, and shorn of its lettering, in a later and sterner Godard film, “2 or 3 Things I Know About Her.” Is the director paying more handsome homage to Strausfeld, or to himself? Possibly the latter, given that Godard had already played the game elsewhere, in “Contempt,” where the side of a building is plastered with big, scrappy posters for Howard Hawks’s “Hatari!,” Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” Rossellini’s “Vanina Vanini,” and “Questa È la Mia Vita”—otherwise known as “Vivre Sa Vie.” Godard, in short, is gluing himself into the pantheon, and thereby preparing the way for Quentin Tarantino, who cheerfully decorates the interiors in “Pulp Fiction” with posters for the kinds of raunchy, rackety B movies (“Sorority Girl,” “Machine Gun Kelly”) that he reveres. Once you start exploring the topic of movie posters inside movies, it must be said, you don’t just dive down a rabbit hole. You enter a warren.

Whether the movie poster will survive, as a minor but compelling art form, is open to debate. The fewer of us who choose to go out to the cinema, the less call there will be for posters and billboards to guide us there. A Strausfeld is no aid to streaming. Yet the fascination, gilded with nostalgia, is unlikely to fade, because the poster itself is a printed paradox: a static and heraldic portent of pictures that move. That is why you should make the effort to see the Strausfelds at Poster House—“unclassifiable images combining absolute freshness and quiet power,” in the words of Michael Lellouche. Peter Strausfeld, by all accounts a modest soul, died in 1980, and the Academy Cinema closed forever in 1986, leaving Oxford Street to dwindle into the purgatorial strip that it is today. The moviegoing banquet may be over, but the menus linger on. ♦